Saturday Science: On "Natural Law"

I'm sure that you've all heard of the Catholic doctrine of "natural law," particularly regarding human sexuality. Well, it seems to have nothing to do with nature, as evidence this story about flamingos at the Edinburgh Zoo:

“When the first egg arrived the parenting couple got really excited and accidentally knocked it off the nest – their natural instinct was then to abandon the egg.

“We don’t usually intervene with our flamingo flock but as this was our first egg since 2010, we carefully picked it up and placed it back on the nest.

“Luckily, one of our same-sex male couples went straight onto the nest, fostered the egg and raised it as their own.”

This is not all that rare. We all remember Silo and Roy at the Bronx Zoo, the inspiration for the book And Tango Make Three -- which, incidentally, tops the banned books list regularly.

So, homosexual behavior occurs in nature rather more frequently than the Catholic bishops would like to admit -- it's been observed in over 450 vertebrate species, in everything from mating rituals to pair bonding.

As for raising offspring:

“We’ve been able to utilise these male male bonds and it’s working out fairly well. Male male pairs are equally able to rear youngsters.”

Same-sex animal pairings raising neglected babies is common both in zoos and in the wild.

Earlier this year, a Kent zoo said that a pair of gay penguins who are raising a baby together are doing a much better job than their straight counterparts.

That holds true of humans, as well (here's a fairly recent review of the literature in this area, and here's a report from the American Psychological Association). And then there's the recent Australian study (Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families) that indicates that children raised by same-sex couples score higher in general health and happiness.

One other thing about "natural law" -- its conflation of sex and reproduction. Unfortunately for the bishops, people mostly don't have sex to make babies -- they have sex because it feels good.

There's a much politics as science in this, for a good reason: the story about the flamingos hit me about the same time this one did, featuring this quote from Cardinal Raymond Burke:

If homosexual relations are intrinsically disordered, which indeed they are — reason teaches us that and also our faith. . . .

Based on evidence from reality, there's obviously a lot more faith than reason in the Church's teachings on sexuality, which, given its conflation of sex and child-rearing, makes the ability of same-sex parents to successfully raise children a key issue. Oh, and one other thing keeps popping into my head on this topic: Control sex and you control the people.

Not that the Church would ever do that.